The English Garden and its future

English Garden: With an area of 375 hectares, the park in Munich is one of the largest in the world. Since 2010, an initiative led by the planning couple Grub / Lejeune has been campaigning to tunnel under the park. This is intended to reunite the parts of the English Garden that have been separated by a traffic lane since 1966. In 2017, the city council voted in favor of the tunnel, and construction work is scheduled to begin in 2023 over a period of four years.

The English Garden is one of Munich’s most famous landmarks. The park, which stretches along the Isar river through the north-eastern part of the city, is home to numerous must-visits for tourists: historic buildings such as the Monopteros or beer gardens such as the one at the Chinese Tower. The English Garden is also a popular place for the people of Munich to relax. Last but not least, the standing wave in the Eisbach is an internationally renowned surf spot in the middle of the Bavarian capital.

With an area of 375 hectares, the English Garden is one of the largest parks in the world. It even surpasses New York’s Central Park or Tempelhofer Park in Berlin by several hectares. For many years, however, there has been a flaw that runs through the English Garden like a scar, splitting it in two, so to speak. We are talking about the Isarring. Created in the 1940s as a military freight road, it has been one of the busiest corridors in Munich since 1966. Every day, 100,000 cars pass through it.

The Isarring divides the Englischer Garten into a smaller area to the south of around two kilometers in length and 130 hectares in area (the original “Englischer Garten”) and a northern area of 245 hectares and three kilometers in length (the “Hirschau”). Pedestrians and cyclists can currently cross the Isarring via a narrow bridge and thus travel between the two parts. The bridge acts as a kind of bottleneck for park visitors: While the southern part of the English Garden is relatively busy for both tourists and locals, relatively few people cross the bridge to get to the northern part.

Reunification: From utopia to resolution in seven years

Hermann Grub and Petra Lejeune, who run an architecture firm in Munich’s Schwabing district, have been passionately campaigning for the reunification of the English Garden for many years. The idea: to reconnect the two parts of the park, the Isarring should be moved underground in a tunnel. Grub and Lejeune first presented their proposal for a 380-metre-long tunnel under the Isar Ring to the Munich City Council in 2010. Initially without success; the idea was dismissed as appealing but utopian. However, this did not stop the architect couple from continuing to tirelessly promote their vision. They describe the project as their “biggest and most important initiative”.

This was not to remain without success. Five years after their defeat at the Munich City Council, the architect couple already had the support of over 80 percent of Munich residents. In a representative survey in 2015, they were in favor of uniting the separate parts of the park. Just one year later, the state of Bavaria pledged 40 million euros in funding for the project, and in 2017 Munich City Council decided to build the park tunnel. The estimated costs for the measures amount to around 125 million euros.

The Isarring will then be lowered over one kilometer and run under the English Garden over a length of around 350 meters. A correspondingly wide green link will be created above ground. The space-consuming access loops from the Isarring for the restaurants at Kleinhesseloher See and Hirschau will then also be eliminated. An access road via a service road will replace the current traffic loops; new parking spaces will be created on the south-eastern part of the Isar ring.

Construction work is set to begin in 2023 and is expected to last until 2027. By then, not only will the English Garden once again be a continuous park, but its original visual axes, path connections and biotope network will also be restored. Munich’s motorists can also look forward to this. The tunneled Isarring will have six lanes instead of just four. This should also solve congestion problems on Ifflandstrasse and Dietlindenstrasse.

You can find out more about the tunneling of the Isarring in the area of the English Garden in Munich at “M-ein Englischer Garten”.

In 2017, G+L already wrote about the vision of (M)ein Englischer Garten. Read more about the utopian beginnings that are now becoming reality.